Daily Recap — November 1

STONE THROWN UNDER THE BUS

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A few members of the Trump orbit have seen fit to portray career political operative Roger Stone as the Bruce Ohr of Wikileaks.

Sloppy Steve Bannon and two other yet-to-be-named former senior Trump campaign staffers apparently told members of King Bob Mueller’s team that Stone, an informal adviser to Trump, cast himself as a way for the campaign to obtain information from WikiLeaks. This was Bannon’s third reported meeting with Mueller’s team. There’s no word on whether he brought a liberal hatchetman along to transcribe everything for a book.

Bannon and the other supposed former Trump campaign officials were reportedly pressed on Stone’s statements about WikiLeaks, and told investigators working for Mueller that Stone gave the impression that he had a direct line to the group.

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Stone initially found himself on Mueller’s radar when he claimed to have prior knowledge that Julian Assange would release documents damaging to Hillzdawg Clinton ahead of the 2016 presidential election, and one former Trump campaign official reportedly told Mueller’s team that he appeared to take credit for the timing of the document’s release.

The emails in question belonged to one John Podesta and were hacked/released in the weeks leading up to the election. Mueller’s investigation later claimed those emails to have been obtained by Russian operatives, and Mueller earlier this year indicted 12 Russian military officers on charges related to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). It should be noted that no evidence has been presented, even a sanitized version to protect classified information.

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While the evidence for Russia’s culpability in hacking our election may not be readily available, there is evidence that Stone was working with Wikileaks, at least in some capacity.

Recently released emails show Stone bugging Bannon and Breitbart Editor Matthew Boyle about upcoming Wikileaks dumps and wanting to share information about the hacked emails before they were publicly shared.

On Oct. 3, 2016, Boyle emailed Stone about a press conference Julian Assange was set to hold the next day, during which Assange promised to release a new trove of documents.

Stone replied to Boyle that same day, saying that he would tell Bannon — then the head of Breitbart — about the contents of the documents but “he doesn’t call me back.”

Boyle then forwarded the correspondence to Bannon, telling him that he “should call Roger” and that he didn’t get the information “from me.”

Indeed, Assange held his conference the next morning, announcing that he planned to release “significant material” each week for the coming months, some of which was related to the U.S. presidential election.

Assange failed to produce the significant material Stone had promised, though, which reinforced Bannon’s skepticism of what Stone actually had to offer.

“What was that this morning???” Bannon asked via email after the Assange presser.

Stone replied that Assange has a “serious security concern.”

“He thinks they are going to kill him and the London police are standing done,” Stone wrote.

“However —a load every week going forward,” he added.

“He didn’t cut deal w/ clintons???” Bannon asked.

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Stone has repeatedly denied having inside knowledge of WikiLeaks’s actions, and has instead claimed that New York comedian and former radio host Randy Credico was his source. Credico has testified before Mueller’s grand jury about Stone, however, denying Stone’s claim as “complete nonsense.”

Stone has since written an op-ed for The Daily Caller called titled “The Treachery of Steve Bannon in which he alleges that Bannon and/or former Trump campaign staffer Sam Nunberg, had leaked the email exchanges to the media. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time Bannon leaked to hurt the Trump administration.

Stone also reiterated that the information he shared in the emails, outside of those surrounding Assange’s security concerns, was publicly available at the time.

“If the Grand Jury was told that either of my comments to Bannon were based on anything other than information I had already attributed to my source under oath or information reported publicly that day, they were misled,” Stone wrote.

“What I am guilty of is using publicly available information and a solid tip to bluff, posture, hype and punk Democrats on Twitter. This is called ‘politics.’ It’s not illegal.”

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BIG PICTURE:

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Let’s assume that Roger Stone and Julian Assange were in constant contact during the election and Stone knew of every Wikileaks dump ahead of time. That’s not illegal. What Mueller must demonstrate — if he’s to have any hope of prosecution — is that Stone was aware of Russian hacking. That would make him an accessory to a conspiracy charge against the U.S.

We’ve seen no hint of that even in the press releases seeking to crucify him, which leads me to believe that it probably doesn’t exist.

Here’s what one must understand about Roger Stone. First off, he’s one of the most accomplished political operatives of his generation. Yes, he plays dirty. He, himself admits to earning his reputation as a “dirty trickster.” Dims hate Roger because he’s burned them so many times over the years, from the Nixon days to the Dubya recount in Florida.

The second thing you must understand about Roger Stone is he is relentless with self-hype, and is often full of crap. Stone makes grand announcements and claims that must be taken with a grain of salt, which is why Bannon and others were hesitant to take him seriously regarding the Wikileaks matter. Stone wanted everyone to believe that he was right in the thick of things, even conducting the orchestra at times. He was almost certainly exaggerating his role in the Wikileaks operation, just as he was almost certainly trying to reel more viewers to InfoWars when he stood on a street corner with Alex Jones telling everyone that the NWO was about to install Mitt Romney as the GOP candidate at the Republican National Convention.

I’ll save you the suspense on both accounts: Stone was not intimately involved in the mining of Clinton information, nor did he have an NWO member leaking details of their ill-fated Romney plot.

But his Twitter bragging has provided King Bob Mueller and his media sycophants with something to point to as OMG RUSSIAN COLLUSION. It’s not much, but it’s all they have.

As such, I’m sure we’ll be hearing about this plenty moving forward.

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MORE OBAMA CORRUPTION

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While the Fake News were screaming bloody murder about Roger Stone’s Twitter declarations, actual journalists were revealing yet more corruption from arguably the most corrupt administration in American history.

We now know that Obama’s CIA intercepted and analyzed the email of some congressional staffers. The agency publicly confirmed as much this week, releasing declassified notifications from 2014 that contained details of the spying.

What’s worse was the nature of the emails they were intercepting. The emails dealt with CIA whistle-blowers, and the agency said they were snared during “routine counterintelligence (CI) monitoring of government computer systems.”

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The agency then prepared a report on the information in the emails — apparently sensitive conversations about protecting whistle-blowers looking to report wrongdoing by the agency.

The inspector general at the time, I. Charles McCullough III, called the collection “lawful and justified.” Technically, he’s correct. Every security clearance holder knows that use of government computer systems implies consent to monitoring, and clearance holders are reminded by the home screen every time they log on. That doesn’t, however, speak to the motivations of the CIA in specifically compiling this info for a report. I’m really interested to hear the IG’s justification for preparing a report containing private conversations involving whistleblowers.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley seems to agree with me, as he issued a statement portraying the situation as a whitewash of the serious issues.

“The fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading congressional staff’s emails about intelligence community whistle-blowers raises serious policy concerns as well as potential constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly,” Grassley said.

This is not a new issue for Sen. Grassley. Prior to this release, he’d been trying for four years to get two 2014 memos detailing the spying to be made public. He blamed “bureaucratic foot-dragging” by Barry henchmen James Clapper and John Brennan for shielding the info from public view, a claim about which he is absolutely correct.

The good news is, the new IG Michael K. Atkinson appears to be much more interested in doing his job that his predecessor, which is a big reason this info has come to light. It also helps to have Gina Haspel leading the CIA rather than subversive communist John Brennan. Grassley has long been known as the whistleblower’s best friend on Capitol Hill and he’s finally got a partner toward that end.

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BIG PICTURE:

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It’s nice to see the agency come clean about this, but it’s not enough. Those who ordered the report should be testifying before Congress, not only regarding this particular matter but any other similiar actions.

Events like these are rarely isolated. Brennan and Clapper presided over a culture at the top of the intelligence community from which we’ve only begun to recover, and I’m willing to bet every meager cent in my name that there are lots more “memos” where this came from.

Go on the offensive here, PDT. We need your prior declassification orders to be carried out and a whole lot more.

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VICTORY FOR VOTER ID

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Better have your voter ID in North Dakota….even you Injuns.

A federal district court judge today refused to temporarily exempt Native Americans in North Dakota from a state law requiring residents to show a valid ID that lists a current residential street address when voting.

Chief Judge Daniel Hovland, of the U.S. District Court for North Dakota, cited the upcoming midterm election in his decision to reject the emergency request for temporary relief from the requirement to provide proof of a residential address.

Hovland, a Dubya appointee, stated, “The federal courts are unanimous in their judgment that it is highly important to preserve the status quo when elections are fast approaching.”

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This ruling could be important, as ND is home to a key Senate race this year, with Dim Sen. Heidi Heitkamp relying on support from Native Americans in her campaign against GOP Rep. Kevin Cramer. Native Americans played a big role in her 2012 election and are counted on as a reliable voting bloc.

In April, the district court blocked the voter ID law from being enforced, but that order was stayed by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals on Sept. 24. It was appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court, who denied a request from the plaintiffs to toss out the 8th Circuit’s ruling.

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BIG PICTURE:

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This is a nice little victory. Anything that strengthens the integrity of our voting system should be celebrated.

I would hesitate to celebrate too hard, though, as the Judge’s reasoning had more to do with not rocking the boat before an election more than the actual merits of the case.

There does seem to be a new strain of sanity within the judiciary as a whole these days, though, and with the record number of judicial appointments by the Trump administration, that strain is sure to grow.

Thank God.

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